Games Convention 2004

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Heroes of Annihilated Empires

After that long chapter I'll make this one short. Heroes of Annihilated Empires will be a RTS game based on a severly pumped up Cossacks engine. It features true 3D landscape with perspective (and it looks reeeeally great!) and 2D units for being able to have masses of them (but they don't look that good currently). All in all, it will be for RTS freaks, will have heroes but not as dominating ones asin Warcraft 3, will have some RPG elements, some major magical gadgets (he showed us a tornado several times and it was amazing) but it is far form being finished. Only some ingame editor was shown without any gameplay yet. You like RTS? Remember it!

Prince of Persia 2

Cool made booth, medieval columns everywhere, console based game with great graphics, better what I have ever seen on some console, featuring a fast and furious combat system. I worry that it will be single player only (so nothing for hexe and me) but for the singles of this world with a faible for orientalic stories and settings it will be fun. Damn good looking fun.

LEGO Star Wars

Now for my personal, absolute, ultimate pearl of games of this convention: LEGO Star Wars. Yes, you did read right, it's about little pastic men (and women) with little plastic legs and little plastic arms, shooting with little plastic blasters and wielding little plastic lightsabers, to mow down little plastic droids and little plastic troopers. It's all in a big plastic world and everything - and I mean really everything - looks like LEGO. From the trade federation droids over Darth maul to Obi Wand toward the little plastic beer mugs in the little plastic cantina.

Minutes over minutes we watched the people play and we could never focus on one of the four demo screens where it was shown because at any screen was happening something interesting.

For example Obi Wan and Qui Gon Jin jumping around, doing backflips, whirling their lightsabers in the aisles of the trade federation ship of Episode 1, mowing down trade federation droids one after another. With little plastic visuals and little plastic LEGO pieces being strayed out all over the floor after their carnage.

Gosh, that game will come in 2005 and till that I have to manage to get a PS2 because I will want to play that game. Together with hexe since it is cooperative, singlescreen, with little plastic health bars. OMG! This is... amazing... it is... Star Wars... and it is... LEGO! (reality check: how old am I? 28? really?!?)

Metal Slug 3

Run'n'gun, heroes vs. villains, tiny people, looks like fun. Hope you can spot something on my photo...

Speedlink

I'm not sure what Speedlink sells, I suppose it's about hardware, but what I am sure of is that they truly believe in the concept "sex sells": every freaking 15 minutes or so they did have a babe dance show, including a full dance stage, music, bass, lights, smoke and very few textiles on bare skin. I could only take a photo shot from far away because I didn't want to merge with the massive crowd in front of the stage. That crowd mainly did three things: staring at the girls, yelling "ME! ME! ME!" and catching the giveaways being thrown towards them. They really did throw many of those giveaways and I have no clue where on their booth they stored the truckloads of them. Nevertheless I avoided the perimeter of that scenery: I could have been accidently hit by some giveaway and then would have been ripped apart by the big-eyed, loud-screaming, hand-grabbing crowd coming at me. No, this was not the booth with Resident Evil, it was only about some freakin' hardware.

Eye Candy

Between all the compter games there had been some life sized standups which I don't want to keep secret from you...

Next to some more plastic ladies there had even been some quite nice mini figures of the Sacred lady:

Saga of Ryzoom

MMPORG, featuring a beautiful, blue hair having front cover lady. I don't know much but what was shown on the monitors just looked like a MMPORG: lovely detailed characters fighting lovely detailed monsters with lovely detailed spells on some dull, no vegetation featuring, flat, brown polygon of a landscape. And not even my photo of the convention babe in a damn erotic dress of that particular front lady was enough lit to recognize her. Damn!

Resident Evil

(some text here to accompany some really nice photos of the aged 18+ booth with a Resident Evil 2 movie trailer outside and some unknown content inside)

Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War

Warhammer's brand is a garanty for a well sold game and even while I do not like Warhammer for their perverse high prices of their tin figures I seem to like to computer game. I've not seen that much but what I've seen was solid RTS gaming. On my little scribble block I noted only one word concerning Dawn of War: "nice"

Restricted Area

This game is from Germany and it looks like a polished up Diablo 2 diving into the cyberpunk genre. I am really looking forward to it since I heard the rumor before that it will feature cooperative multiplayer. I could not confirm that since nobody of the developers hat been at the GC2004, just a lonely demo PC was waiting for visitors.

Well, honestly I don't know what to write more since there was only this one demo PC without any staff around, but I do want to point you at their website because this is one of the games I check the status every week since I am really looking forward to it. So go here now!

The Fall - The Last Days of Gaia

Another promising game seems to be this one: an adventure in the style and feel of Fallout, with a lone gunman in a postapocalyptic world. Very, very, very convincing 3D graphics! If you like Fallout I guess you will like this one, too! Unfortunately one of the developers said "singleplayer only, at least at release" and with that words, WHOOOSH, off it went from our personal interest list. Yeah, relationships really limit your personal freedoms....

Visual Impressions

I still have some more photos to show but I don't have words for them to write.

Earth 2160

When we intended our departure, left the halls of hell and entered the lobby in the middle of the area we stumbled over what [WOLF]D.O.A. had asked us to look for: the Zuxxez cinema featuring Earth 2160.

It was a little cinema with about 20 seats, but it was build inside a large scale model of a Earth 2160 drop ship.

What a view! Damn impressive. I just let the photos speak. All in all it was "guarded" by some troops and some babes. Even here I let the picture speak.

Inside was shown a 5 minute trailer of Earth 2160. Not just some scenes cut together but it was a real short movie with a story about two marines with some vehrrry fuhnny Rrrushiaaan akkzentz. It's really good. And according to the credits it is rendered in real time with the ingame engine of Earth 2160 - uopsie, that's cool. I thought it was prerendered...

All the leftovers.....

According to my premade list there were some leftovers, some games that we didn't see. In this chapter at the end I just want to tell you which and why not...

World of Warcraft was shown at two locations: first was the Blizzard booth which featured high black walls, a glimmering blue logo, a single entrance and about 200 people waiting in front of it. Nope, didn't want to wait that long. Second was some other booth which featured about 3 meters times 3 meters space, two overheating PCs running World of Warcraft, one helpless looking poor guy obviously "being in charge" (or better "being charged") and maybe 25 people trying go grasp 1) a view on WoW and 2) enough air to breath. Nope, we didn't want to go in there, too. But be made a "through the palm tree" action photo.

Stalker was shown behind some high walls, too, in some tiny cubicle. Imagine this: horde of people forming some kind of "line", right under a huge Stalker poster. Big sign left: 18+. Big sign right: 16+. Left side: Stalker. Right side: Dawn of War. Left side: security guards. Right side: nobody caring. Left side: aforementioned line of horde of people. Right side: nobody caring. Guess what? I did choose right side, had four Dawn of War demo PCs for my own, took some notes and left again after 3 minutes. Sorry guys, after six hours of hordes and masses and aching feet I simply dropped Stalker within the blink of an eye.

Halo 2 : Microsoft usually does it the big way: big booth, big stage, big auditorium, big amount of vistors. Between us and our view on Halo 2 had been over 500 people. Big U-turn on our side.

NBA 2005 : Dear JohnnyKnoxville, I have to apologize, my inner ear condition didn't accept any one more minute at that way-too-loudspeakers featuring cinema of EA. I had now clue where to start searching for NBA 2005 and I really wasn't in the mood for.

Paraworld is a very promising game from Spiele Entwicklungs Kombinat Ost from Berlin. I was searching for it, I was using every hint, every clue, the official convention guide, the official convention information PCs, the official business relations companies listing. Hey, I even asked the guys from Krawall and Wings Simulations whether they have noticed some slight appereance of Paraworld or SEK-Ost or Sunflowers, the publisher. Nope. Zero, zip, zilch, nothing. What a pitty. I really wanted to see this game myself

More Skin

Just a little hint: if you want to see even more babes from games Convention 2004 then just head over to a special website dedicated completely to the female convention staff: GC-babes

Way Home

It was 8:15pm when we left the convention and due to our last meal being 13 hours ago we had been hungry. I picked up a restaurant guide at the convention and we selected a nice Mexican location to have dinner. We had no town map of Leipzip, only a road name, but we started the adventure anyway. We had to ask only once(!) and then found the right road. I was surprised myself since I had foreseen ourselves hanging out in some cheap fast food dinner after hours of hopeless searching. But instead we had a candlelight dinner and a worthy end for this beautiful day. What came afterwards was an ugly night: dark, rainy, wet roads, a sleeping girlfriend and one of the hardest ways home I ever had. Being home at 2:30am with not a single drop of fuel in the tank and 570 km on the speedometercounter that Games Convention 2004 trip had been over. It was worth it! We'll do this again next year - but maybe Thursday or Friday that time...

Okeydokey, thank you for reading here, hope you enjoyed the review of our little trip, see you online on some WOLF servers, happy gaming and bye,

[WOLF]lady hexe & [WOLF] T.T.H.

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